Stand
up and be identified
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Parvinder Sandhu, senior
director of Worldwide Immigration Consul ancy Ser-vices
(wwics), can be con-tacted at 905-564-7797 or 1-888-77-wwics.
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The gruesome ter-rorist attacks on New York and Washington
were expected to have some kind of repercussions on Canadian
immigration policy.
As the first step in this direction, citizenship
and immigration minister Elinor Capalan announced that the federal
government would spend as much as $18 million to issue 'fraud-proof'
identity cards to landed immigrants.
It may be mentioned here that until the September
11 attack on America, the landed immigrants' visa was a fraud-prone
document. However, now a plastic photo-id card, similar to a
health card, will replace the paper document issued until now
to all of Canada's new landed immigrants.
While the cost for the project to replace the
document with tamper-proof id cards is expected to be close
to a staggering $18 million, the programme would likely cost
anything between $5 million and $10 million a year to administer.
As per the reports emanating from the immigration
ministry, one of the companies that intends to bid for the immigrant
card project is information technology firm eds Canada. It is
reportedly already in discussions with the immigration department.
The driving reason for introducing the new
id card system perhaps is the fact that at present the paper
document that is the landed immigrant visa can be duplicated
with ease. In fact, it has been pointed out that anybody with
a good laser printer can duplicate the landed immigrant visa.
The new photo id cards are likely to be embedded
with a number of holographic and other security features that
will make them forgery-resistant. The new cards would also use
a strip with a computer chip across the back to store data about
the cardholder that can be read by scanners. The other added
security feature is likely to be a person's thumbprint on the
card so that when the card is swiped, the person at the same
time sticks his thumb into a biometric reader for a comparison.
The other additional information that the card would bear is
height and eye colour.
The programme is part of the $280 million in
funding for new security measures announced recently by foreign
affairs minister John Manley. Other measures include 300 new
security-related jobs in border and airport security, immigration
screening, customs enforcement and general policing and improvements
in the ability to share information with intelligence and police
agencies.
There are tens of hundreds of people with 'landed
immigrant' status and Canada is likely to continue to maintain
the immigration level of 200,000 every year.
